Team Update: May

Late spring is filled with the scent of lily of the valley - or at least that is what is traditionally said about this time of the year. May is somehow here already and in this instalment of our monthly update blog, we’re getting stuck into new projects and big topics.

‍NHS England

Our new project with NHS England is getting properly off the ground this month and we’re delighted to introduce two new team members – Jana and Humma. They’ve joined us on a temporary basis to help out as the project gets started and we prepare a job description for a more formal role. This position will be advertised soon and we’ll be sharing it far and wide, so watch this space!

In the meantime, we’ll let Humma and Jana introduce themselves:

 Humma

I’m a first year PhD student on the UCL-Wellcome Mental Health Science PhD programme. I previously worked at The McPin Foundation, a charity championing involving lived experience throughout the research process. I also use my own lived experience in there search I do and is passionate about ensuring research is informed by experiential expertise as much as professional expertise. Having worked on project co-ordination and multi-site implementation research in the NHS, I’m excited to apply my experience and expertise to co-ordinate the co-production of better hearing checks for children in residential schools.

Jana

I’m a PhD student at the Centre for Research in Autism and Education at UCL. I’m particularly thrilled to be working on a co-produced project supporting the development of improved hearing checks that are suitable for young people with autism and/or learning disabilities. I’m excited with the idea that there are advantages and challenges associated with autistic people’s attentional processes. My PhD focuses on perceptual and attentional processes in autistic people, and finding ways to harness and supporting aspects of superior attention in autistic people. My values strongly align with participatory research approaches and I have worked with participants on visual and auditory tasks, so it is exciting to be applying my skills directly in the NHS hearing project and to come a step closer to improve services and outcomes for young people.

Co-creating our payment policy  

If you attended the first of our two payment policy co-creation sessions this month then you’ll have already met Humma and Jana, as they joined us to facilitate the session along with Danny from Co:Create. This is a really complex and sensitive issue so wanted to make sure we create a space where everyone feels able to be challenging and transparent. There are still places for the second part of these sessions, so sign up here!

The two sessions explore some of the key considerations for co-creating our policy. In the first session we used four imaginary co-producers to help us explore how we decide who is eligible for payment for co-producing with us. In an ideal world, we’d be able to offer payment to everyone, in line with our values. But in the real world, that’s just not possible. So together we started thinking through how to do this inclusively, and what else we can offer as part of a co-producer ‘package’.

Don’t worry if you can’t make the sessions as we’ll be sharing a new draft of the payment policy for further co-creation ‘in your own time’ in June. This will take into account the outputs from these sessions as well as the original feedback from the first draft in December/January.

‍Partnership working

In amongst all this, we’ll also be finding time to continue our work with internal and external partners. This month we’ll be catching-up with Traverse to hear about their new lived experience advisory panel and attending UCL Grand Challenges meetings. We sit on a couple of working groups for this initiative which brings researchers together across disciplines to tackle social issues such as global health and cultural understanding. Niccola has also written a blog for their Disruptive Voices series about why co-production is the future; we’ll be sharing that here on our website when its published.  

 Last but not least, we’re running a workshop at the packed Stronger Together Festival of Co-production Learning, hosted by Ageing Better partners. If you haven’t already, make sure to check out their programme and join us on Tuesday 18 May at 11am for ‘Creating a Co-production Culture’.

‍Get involved

Don’t forget you can keep up to date with all our upcoming sessions via our events page, join the conversations on Twitter, or share your thoughts and ideas at coproduction@ucl.ac.uk. We’re especially keen to hear from anyone interested in writing a blog for us, so please get in touch!

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